Heinz Rein - Berlin Finale

It is five minutes past twelve. The city’s breath is suffocated beneath the vapour of smoke and haze rolling through the streets, its veins are opened, the tortured body bleeding its last. A pestilential miasma cloaks the jungle of ruins, mountains of human bodies and animal corpses, the wrecks of burnt-out, blasted tanks and vehicles, heaps of debris, bottomless craters, leaning house walls, exploded bridges, blazes block the streets. The battle still rages in the city centre, on the Kaiserdamm and around the high-rise bunkers in Friedrichshain, by the Zooloigical Garden, and in Humboldthain by Gesundbrunnen Station, aerial battles are being fought between Russian fighters and German supply planes, while new companies have been assembled of the wounded and the scattered, old Volkssturm men and fifteen-year-old members of the Hitler Youth, thrown into battle inadequately armed or with instructions to grab the weapons of the fallen.

Wilhelmplatz lies empty and dead beneath the furious fire of the Russian artillery, only the breadth of the square recalls its former purpose, the parade ground of enthusiasm, the hysterical enthusiasm of a people seduced, and the compulsory enthusiasm of the helots, nothing recalls the torchlight procession of the SA on 30 January 1933, the marches of the Luftwaffe regiments to musical accompaniment, the compulsory presence of school classes at the visits of illustrious guests, the choral calls of ‘We want to see the Führer!’ and the slavish cries of ‘Führer command us, we will follow you!’ nothing more is there, banners, insignias and standards, torches and Turkish crescents have vanished from the granite slabs of the square. Only ruins line it now, the Hotel Kaiserhof, the Dreifaltigkeitskirche, the Finance Ministry, the Reich Transport Office, the Reich Chancellery, the Propaganda Ministry.

The Reich Chancellery is under constant fire, piece by piece the shells eat away at the masonry and unmask the fraudulent display of fake marble, thin sandstone slabs and cheap pink bricks. As on a target, the bullets of the low-flying planes drill into the plaster, walls and ceilings begin to tear apart, mirrors shatter, crystal chandeliers crash and splinter to the parquet floors.

In the underground bunker beneath the garden of the Reich Chancellery, the Führer Adolf Hitler sits on a wooden box. His face is twisted and distorted, his features slack and feeble, his skin pale and covered with bright-red patches, a spasmodic twitch tugs at the corners of his mouth every few seconds, his eyes are bulging far from their sockets and red-rimmed, his gaze is blank, his hands are trembling, his hair is damp and clammy, and the sweat stands out in fat droplets on his brow.

The leader of the Great German Reich, sitting there, ugly and crumpled with anxiety, does not look like a happy bridegroom, who married his long-term lover the previous evening and entertained his guests with sparkling wine. The wedding ceremony was only the prelude to the gruesome, trashy operetta staged according to the orders given by the deranged petty-bourgeois from Braunau, just as he ordered millions of people to be hunted into misery, poverty, death, despair, hunger, fire, gas chambers, mass graves, gallows, prisons, concentration camps, military hospitals and the Labour Front. This Führer, who exerted his tyrannical power over the continent of Europe, who had all the means of power and all the sources of information at his disposal, who played with generals as children play with pebbles, who had a whole people lying at his feet in hysterical ecstasy, a people who had taken all gifts from his hands as if they were gifts from God and who listened to his words as if they were the word of God, this great Führer is now sitting in the underground bunker on a plain wooden box and asking his chauffeur, ‘Any news?’

But his chauffeur is not in a position to tell him the news he wishes to hear, that the reserve armies are close by, or that Field Marshal Ritter von Greim has effectively struck in the battle for Berlin with the remains of his Luftwaffe. It can no longer be kept secret that Russian tanks coming from the Brandenburg Gate have reached Potsdamer Platz, the Tiergarten and Weidendammer Bridge, that on the Reichstag, whose blaze twelve years ago went on to rage across the whole world, the red flag of the Soviets now flutters, that Russian tanks are also moving from the south along Wilhelmstrasse northward towards the Reich Chancellery, that Russian infantry are advancing along the underground tunnels at Friedrichstrasse. Neither can it be kept secret any longer that all around the entrance to the bunker a devastating artillery fire is coming down, that the earth is being stirred up, and black fountains of soil are spraying into the air, that the trees are ragged and the walls around the garden of the Reich Chancellery have been laid low. Two days previously he had fetched SS Group Leader Fegelein, Eva Braun’s brother-in-law, from his flat and had him shot because he had attempted to withdraw back into civilian life, in a nocturnal address he had made all the inmates of the bunker take an oath of loyalty to commit mutual suicide, was still preoccupied with defence and relief, intoxicated with the final victory, and had said to Field Marshal Greim: ‘Do not despair, it will all be fine.’ But then the mood had changed again, and he had raged once more like a lunatic through the corridors and rooms of his bunker, when he received the news that his most reliable supporter, Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, had made contact with the Western Allies via the Vice-President of the Swedish Red Cross, Count Folke Bernadotte, and offered the unconditional capitulation of Germany to Great Britain and the United States, the will to total destruction blazed up in him once more. He immediately stamped out the tiny spark of reason, forbidding any radio communication with the special train ‘Steiermark’, Himmler’s headquarters, had, through his Party clerk Bormann, the words ‘Foreign press reports new betrayal, Führer expects unshakeable loyalty from everyone’ broadcast to the four winds, and ordered Schörner from the south of the eastern front, Dönitz from Holstein, Vietinghoff from Italy, Wenck from the Elbe front and Stumpf with the air fleet to relieve the Reich capital, but since then two long, fearful days have passed, and he has had only refusals or no answer at all, which has led Bormann to say ‘betrayal everywhere’. There is no longer any way out, the Führer Adolf Hitler realizes he is surrounded and besieged from the air, he is caught in his own trap. He has not left his bunker for days, and he is not leaving it now, he crouches cravenly deep in the earth below concrete metres thick, he knows that his end has come, that the thousand-year Third Reich that he proclaimed is over, that it is already five minutes past twelve, that the solders whose young gullibility he duped and enslaved with vain gestures and boastful words, whom he despatched six years ago to conquer a world, who toppled cities on his orders and made whole landscapes go up in flames, have now returned from the icy nights of Norway and the roasting desert of Egypt, from the wide steppes of Russia and the unconquerable wall on the coast of France home to the capital of the Reich, but still he does not fall to the scythe-wielding skeleton, he wants the last stalks to be mown down, he wants everything to be harvested this time. He dictates his political and private testament and sends three men with copies to Dönitz, Schörner and to the Party archive in Munich, he appoints Dönitz his successor, draws up a new list of ministers and makes Bormann his executor. And since he lived as a fraud, so he behaves in his final hour, when he orders an announcement to be made that he fell in battle at the head of his soldiers, but he seeks death not in the bullets of the enemy, he creeps cravenly from his accursed life, he orders his chauffeur to get hold of 200 litres of petrol, he bids farewell to his henchmen and withdraws to his room, and while the guards dance with the secretaries to gramophone music, he turns his pistol upon himself and fires into his blasphemous mouth, his wife poisons herself, their corpses are laid by Dr Goebbels and Bormann in the garden of the Reich Chancellery by the emergency exit to the bunker and have petrol poured over them. Under the thunder of the Russian guns and the raised, bloodstained hands of his accomplices, the bodies of Hitler and his lover blaze in bright flames. The stench that has spread across the whole of Europe under his tyranny also accompanies him on his journey to hell.